ch peculiar sanctity in their own persons. The
rule was not a strict one, nor, though the Superior was
careful to enforce it to its utmost rigour, was the life one
of particular hardship or privation. They were a simple, kind,
good-hearted set, these Sisters, having their little disputes,
and contentions, and jealousies among themselves occasionally,
no doubt, but leading good, peaceable lives on the whole, with
each day and hour well filled with its appointed tasks,
leading through a continual, not useless round of embroidery,
teaching, compote-making, and prayers.

Perhaps some one looking round on them, with their honest,
homely Belgian faces, would have tried to imagine some history
for them, in accordance with the traditions that cling about
convent walls, and associate themselves with the very mention
of a nun; and most likely they would have been all wrong. None
of these Sisters had had very eventful lives, and they had,
for the most part, dropped into their present mode of
existence quite naturally. With little romance to look back
upon, save such as finds a place in even the homeliest life,
with an imperfect middle-class education that had failed to
elevate the mind, or give it wide conceptions of life, and
religion, and duty, a certain satisfaction at having done with
secular life and its cares, and at having their future here
and hereafter comfortably provided for, was perhaps the
general tone amongst this prosaic, unimaginative community. We
are, indeed, far from affirming that in that little society
there was no higher tone of religious enthusiasm, that there
were not some who not only found their highest religious ideal
in the life they had chosen, but to whom it formed, in fact,
the highest ideal to which they could attain, and calculated,
therefore, to develope in them the best and noblest part of
their natures. To such, the appointed, monotonous round, the
unquestioning submission to the will of another, the obedience
at once voluntary and enforced, would not only bring a
gracious sense of repose after conflict, but, by satisfying
their religious cravings and aspirations, by demanding the
exercise of those virtues which appeared to them at once the
highest and the most attainable, would give peace to souls
which, in the world's active life, would have tossed for ever
to and fro in reckless unquiet warfare, nor have ever once
perceived that in such warfare they might, after all, be
fulfilling the no